Surfboard shapers to get their due at trade show

Surfboard shaper Gary Linden examines the rails on a 9’6” long board at his Oceanside factory. Surfboard makers
will get their own showcase at this year’s ASR trade show. Charlie Neuman / Union-Tribune photos
— Charlie Neuman

Surfboard shaper Gary Linden examines the rails on a 9’6” long board at his Oceanside factory. Surfboard makers
will get their own showcase at this year’s ASR trade show. Charlie Neuman / Union-Tribune photos
— Charlie Neuman

Much of the ASR show is aimed at retailers looking to find merchandise for their stores. This year, however, the public can check out an array of custom surfboards. Here are the details on Sacred Craft:

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Where: San Diego Convention Center at the Sail Pavilion

Cost: $10

What to expect: Live shaping, art, music, book signings and hundreds of heralded surfboard shapers.

Surfboard shaper Gary Linden puts the finishing touches on a 6’1” short board. More than 1.3 million short boards were sold in 2008.— Charlie Neuman

+Read Caption

Surfboard shaper Gary Linden puts the finishing touches on a 6’1” short board. More than 1.3 million short boards were sold in 2008.
— Charlie Neuman

Think about action sports in California and it’s hard to ignore surfing.

Still, it hasn’t been easy for surfboard makers — the small-time manufacturers who literally help shape the industry — to get attention at ASR. The industry’s trade show, which is held twice a year in San Diego, kicks off this week.

Booths were cost-prohibitive and retailers, who go to the shows to make buys, were too busy checking out the flip-flops, board shorts, sunglasses and bikinis to give surfboard makers much of their time.

“As a surfboard builder, we suffered because there wasn’t a lot of business,” said Gary Linden, a well-known local surfboard shaper. “They’d (retailers) try to fit you in between their meeting with Billabong and Quiksilver. It was a little lonely.”

This year ASR, which has had its own struggles with attendance during the economic downturn, is doing something different. The show has paired up with Sacred Craft, a popular surfboard show, to exhibit the work of master surfboard shapers on Saturday and Sunday. The registration for the larger ASR show starts today and the show opens Friday.

Trade show executives are expanding the surfboard exhibits because they want to build up what is essentially the heart and soul of the industry.

“Surfboards in many ways started this market,” said Andy Tompkins, vice president of ASR.

Through the partnership with Sacred Craft, shapers will now have access to retailers and the media that attend ASR as well as consumers, who can pay $10 to check out the latest in custom boards. Also, participation will be less expensive for board makers than in the past. Exhibitor space at Sacred Craft costs about $600, while floor space at ASR starts at $1,800, he said.

Beyond the economics, Tompkins said it is critical for ASR to acknowledge the surfboard industry.

That may be, but the surfboard industry has faced choppy waters for the past several years. Even before the economy swooned, it was turned upside down in December 2005 when Clark Foam, an iconic Orange County surf company, closed.

Before its abrupt shutdown, the company had supplied almost 90 percent of the domestic foam — the core product in surfboard manufacturing. Gordon Clark, a tough, albeit mercurial businessman, kept prices low and the industry stable with his near monopoly on the foam market.

His exit created chaos and dire predictions that the surfboard business — a hand-built, custom business dependent on local shapers — would be replaced by an influx of pale, and cheap, competition from Asia.

That hasn’t happened and shapers — those who take the rough foam blanks and craft them by hand into surfboards — continue to provide much of the product at local surf shops, said Scott Bass, who founded the Sacred Craft show four years ago.

He said in 2007 and 2008, surf shops were populated with a combination of big-name brands like Channel Islands or low-price Asian imports.

Since then, things have changed.

“Local surf shops saw the light,” Bass said. “They realized shapers were part of the fabric of the community. They are part of our tribe.”

Now, he said, when you shop at Hansen’s Surf Shop in Encinitas, you’ll see boards made by Encinitas shapers. Go to Pacific Beach Surf Shop, it’ll be boards by Pacific Beach shapers.

“Local surfers are looking to local shapers to make their boards,” Bass said.

That jibes with industry numbers. The Board Retailers Association, the trade group for action sports retailers, said the local shapers headed the list of top-selling brands.

While shapers like Linden say the lackluster economy has hurt business, sales in 2009 were flat compared to the previous year and were up from 2006 — which happened to be right after Clark closed shop. In 2009, 1.4 million short boards were sold in the United States, along with 493,000 long boards, said Marie Case, managing partner of Board-Trac, a marketing firm that studies the action sports market.

In 2008, there were 1.38 million short boards sold and 516,000 long boards sold. (The long board sales don’t include the increasingly popular stand-up paddle board market.) In 2006, sales of short boards came in at 934,000 and long board sales at 456,000.

Case said the increase in sales is tied to the aging surfer population. Of the estimated 2.4 million surfers in the United States, more than 60 percent are over 25.

“It’s an older market and frequent surfers tend to have more boards and more money to spend on them,” she said.

Still, the surfboard business is not even a third of the U.S. surf market. While sales for the overall business, which includes other items like sunglasses, wet suits and T-shirts, was $3.6 billion in 2009, surfboard sales were just about $848 million. Also, about 40 percent of all surf shops devote less than 30 percent of their floor space to so-called hardgoods, which includes surfboards, said Melissa Clary, executive director of the Board Retailers Association.

“Generally, the margins on surfboards are low, so successful retailers must also focus on add-ons, accessories and apparel,” she explained.

Bass said it doesn’t matter so much about the surfboard industry’s economic impact — they are integral to the action sports lifestyle.

“Just like you can’t have a car show and not have cars, you can’t have a surf show without surfboards,” he said.